r/feedthebeast • u/Top-Finish-1518 • 1h ago
I made something [Infected Grid: Every road leads back to where it began] A new zombie apocalypse ModPack with fully custom world generation. No broken roads, no random mountains, real cities that blend into suburbs and countryside
Hey everyone! I want to introduce the zombie apocalypse ModPack I’ve been building for Forge 1.20.1, called Infected Grid: Every road leads back to where it began. I’d also love your input on where the map should go next.
The world generation
Most zombie packs use Lost Cities, and you know the problems: highways that end in midair, roads chopped up by terrain, mountains crashing through buildings. I wanted something that actually feels like a real place, so I wrote my own world generation from scratch and replaced Minecraft’s normal terrain.
- No broken highways, no dead end roads, no random mountains messing up buildings.
- Flat, believable ground, with lakes and rivers that the cities are planned around.
- A full road network: interstates with interchanges, city streets, alleys, tree lined parkways and more.
- Underground there’s a subway and a sewer system, and above ground an elevated train line and rail between cities.
- Every building is designed in code and furnished room by room. No premade structure packs. Inside you’ll find blood, bodies, papers, broken glass, cobwebs and more, like months have passed since the outbreak.
- Real furniture, not vanilla-block hacks. Every building is furnished with furniture and decoration mods: real couches, stoves, fridges, beds and TVs in the homes, and the same goes for every other structure, from gun store counters to hospital beds to the popcorn machines at the theater. You won’t find a fridge made of an iron block and a button, or a table made of a fence post and a pressure plate.
As far as I know, nobody else has pulled off a full city to countryside generator like this for a zombie pack.
How the world is laid out
Each city grows outward in areas that blend into each other, so there are no hard lines:
- Downtown: skyscrapers, hotels, parking garages, City Hall, a courthouse, a police HQ, a hospital, a cathedral, plazas, construction sites with tower cranes, and more. There are also big landmarks like a full Field Museum, a Navy Pier style pier on the lake, and an AMC 12 movie theater with 12 auditoriums and its own parking lot.
- Mid rise apartments: apartment blocks, corner stores, bars, diners, etc.
- Suburbs: houses, strip malls, gas stations, gun stores, pharmacies, hardware stores, schools, supermarkets, big malls with a food court and a cinema, etc.
- Industry: works yards, warehouses, a prison, a military base, etc.
- Countryside: farms, barns, silos, small towns along the roads, etc.
None of the buildings are final
Everything in the pictures is still being worked on. I’m planning to heavily rework downtown so there aren’t many copy paste buildings and every block feels different. In the suburbs I’m adding a rich neighborhood with big houses. Shops already come in several designs each, so you shouldn’t find the same gun store or bar twice in a row.
Other things in the pack
- Cars, and fuel that’s actually scarce. There’s a vehicle mod, but you won’t find working cars lying around. You build them from parts you scavenge at auto repair shops and military areas. The only place to refuel is a gas station, so a road trip takes planning, like it would in real life.
- Working trains. I’m adding real train stations using the Create mod. The underground subway and the trains above ground will run actual routes between places, not just randomly placed track.
- Loot that makes sense. Every building gets loot that fits what it was: food and snacks in the theater, meds in pharmacies, guns and ammo at gun stores and the police HQ, tools at hardware stores, etc. Guns come from TACZ.
- Real places to explore. The landmarks are modeled on real buildings, and their interiors follow real floor plans, from the museum’s exhibit halls to the theater’s projection booth.
Where should the map go? I honestly can’t decide.
Option A: an infinite state map, with updates. The world stays how it is: a state where downtown blends into the mid rise apartments, then the suburbs, then the countryside. Go far enough past the countryside and you end up in another state, forever. Future updates would add Arizona, a desert state where patient zero was and where the virus started. It would be one big quarantine zone, maybe sealed off entirely. I’m still working out how to build it. You could even take the train there.
Option B: a Project Zomboid style map, but infinite. Instead of repeating cities, you’d get a Project Zomboid kind of layout: roads leading out to towns, those towns leading to a downtown, and so on, with the world generating forever like option A. Somewhere on the map there would still be a big area where it all started, so you can go find out what happened.
Option C: one state that grows with every update. Instead of infinite generation, the world starts as one complete state. Each update adds a new one: Arizona as the first update, where the virus started, then more states after that. Over time it slowly builds out into a full country you can travel across.
Option D: everything in a normal Minecraft world. All the cities, towns and landmarks I’ve built get scattered through regular random world generation. You’d find them as you travel and explore, instead of the whole world being one connected map.
What I’d love to hear
- Option A, B, C or D, and why?
- Would a story and a place where it all started make you want to explore farther from spawn?
- Which buildings or places would you most want to loot?
- Any other ideas for the pack? Drop them in the comments. I read everything, and nothing’s locked in yet.
Thanks for reading! I’ll keep posting pictures and updates here as the pack comes together.
